Calendar of Events

Philosophical and Scientific Europe from the 4th International Congress of Philosophy in Bologna (1911) to the First World War

The Symposium, placed under the patronage of UNESCO, is organized in the framework of the International Research Programme entitled “Intellectual Europe and the First World War” of the International Research Center for Philosophy, Letters, and Knowledge (Ecole normale supérieure, Paris, France). It will present an opportunity to reflect on the exchanges between the most important national European philosophical and scientific traditions before the First World War of 1914-1918, which constituted the moment of rapture and division of Europe that erased a considerable part of its history of interconnections and unity.

The symposium will be convened in two parts: on 13 October 2012 in Paris, France, and on 18 and 19 October in Bologna, Italy.

The chronological starting point will be the Fourth International Congress of Philosophy held in Bologna in 1911 with the participation of such philosophers and scholars as Henri Bergson, Pierre Boutroux, Federigo Enriques, Giuseppe Peano, David Émile Durkeim, Benedetto Croce, Henri Poincaré, Paul Langevin, Louis Couturat, Hans Driesch, Erminio Juvalta, Vito Volterra, Hans Vahinger, Guido Castelnuovo, Édouard Claparède, Giulio Cesare Ferrari, Hugo Dingler, Edmond Goblot, F.S.C. Schiller. They were then interested in anthropology, in psychology and in legal and social philosophy.

These study days will aim at highlighting not only the role of the World Congress of Philosophy but that of many international philosophy magazines, including such as « La Revue de métaphysique et de morale » ("Magazine of Metaphysics and Morality") and « Scientia », in the construction of the philosophical Europe at the "age of nationalism".

At the crossroads of philosophy and social sciences, history and politics, the symposium will examine the relationship established in the early 1910s between philosophy and war. The analysis will be carried out based on the previously unpublished materials from the point of view of tensions that existed between the national and universal approaches of various schools of thought and doctrines or regarding the international initiatives which after the end of the First World War led to the setting up of the League of Nations and its International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (later the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation in Paris), an organization which, between the two world wars, played the role that is attributed today to UNESCO.